--"I was born in the year
1632, in the City of York, of a good family, though not of that country,
my father being a foreigner of Bremen, named Kreutznaer, who first
settled at Hull," though Borrow himself would have written it: "I was
born in the year 16---, in the City of Y---, of a good family, though not
of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, named Kruschen,
who first settled at H---." Probably he remembered also that other
fictitious autobiography of Defoe's, "The Adventures of Captain
Singleton," of the child who was stolen and disposed of to a Gypsy and
lived with his good Gypsy mother until she happened to be hanged, a
little too soon for him to be "perfected in the strolling trade." Defoe
had told him long before Richard Ford that he need not be afraid of being
low. He could always give the same excuse as Defoe in "Moll
Flanders"--"as the best use is to be made even of the worst story, the
moral, 'tis hoped, will keep the reader serious, even where the story
might incline him to be otherwise." In fact, Borrow did afterwards claim
that his book set forth in as striking a way as any "the kindness and
providence of God." Even so, De Quincey suggested as an excuse in his
"Confessions" the service possibly to be rendered to other opium-eaters.
Borrow tells us in the twenty-second chapter of "Lavengro" how he sought
for other books of adventure like "Robinson Crusoe"--which he will not
mention by name!--and how he read many "books of singular power, but of
coarse and prurient imagination." One of these, "The English Rogue," he
describes as a book "written by a remarkable genius." He might have
remembered in its preface the author lamenting that, though it was meant
for the life of a "witty extravagant," readers would regard it as the
author's own life, "and notwithstanding all that hath been said to the
contrary many still continue in this belief." He might also have
remembered that the apology for portraying so much vice was that the
ugliness of it--"her _vizard-mask_ being remov'd"--"cannot but cause in
her (_quondam_) adorers, a _loathing_ instead of _loving_." The dirty
hero runs away as a boy and on the very first day tires of nuts and
blackberries and longs "to taste of the _fleshpots_ again." He sleeps in
a barn until he is waked, pursued and caught by Gypsies. He agrees to
stay with them, and they have a debauch of eating, drinking and
fornication, which makes him well content to joi